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Digital Marketing

Twitter Chat Rules & Tools for Beginners

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Twitter chats have been around for years, but they seem to be increasing with industries like pharmaceutical, education, marketing and new business efforts. For example, see all these chats in the pharma industry. I thought laying down some of the rules and tools for Twitter Chats would be a good start for those just thinking about starting a chat. To begin you should know that twitter chats are great engagement and highly targeted to your audience.

tweet chatThe average engagement stats for popular Twitter chats are:

  • Posts – 1450
  • Users – 289
  • Reach – 1,456,928
  • Impressions – 13,993,986

And If you’re wondering if Twitter is still growing, know that;

tweet chatsSo what is a Twitter Chat?

Twitter chats are public Twitter conversations that take place surrounding a specific hashtag at a predetermined date and time. The hashtag often provides some context for the topic or theme of the chat, and allows people to easily find the conversation and participate. Most often, Twitter chats are not one-off discussions, but rather recurring events.

A Twitter chat can help you:

  • Build authority and establish your brand’s leadership in your area
  • Enable members of your business to be identified as influencers
  • Make new connections with relevant Twitter users
  • Share valuable and informational content with your audience
  • Boost your brand awareness through increased mentions and discussions surrounding your brand

Tips to Make a Twitter Chat Worth Your Time

  • Participate in a chat before hosting your own.
  •  Choose the right topic for your audience.
  •  Find the right date and time.
  • Choose the right hashtag
    • A hashtag chat is a way of organizing a conversation so that anyone on Twitter can follow, join, and contribute. It centers around a single hashtag, often including the word “chat”, that usually denotes the broad topic of conversation. Hashtag chats are pre-organized and occur at the same time every day, week or month..
    • Do your research to find something unique. 
    • Keep it short and sweet.. 
  • Choose the right moderator.
  • Invite relevant influencers and community members to participate.
  • Create a Chat Brief.
  • Promote. Promote. Promote.

chat toolsTools to Host or Engage:

Chats can be very active, with a lot of people participating and a lot of new tweets coming in every moment, so there is a great chance you will miss something important and become frustrated after at first. Luckily, there are tools you can use to make this process easier and much more enjoyable.

if You’re Participating in a chat:

TweetChat

TweetChat is where the world comes to chat. A Twitter chat platform which allows users to participate in real-time hashtag conversations, visit and share their comments. To make things run as smoothly as possible, you can filter a Twitter chat conversation by hashtag from the aptly named TweetChat.

It also provides an easy-to-use share button that allows anyone to promote the chat from within the app.

Other major benefits include the ability to pause Tweets or choose the speed that new posts head your way, so you have a chance to read and reply. The minimum interval is five seconds, which for some Twitter users might be a slow in terms of updating Tweets.

Tchat

Tchat.io is a web service that makes it incredibly easy to participate in Twitter chats. You simply enter a hashtag that you want to follow and the tool will instantly load all the tweets with that hashtag. Tchat will update the stream with new tweets in real-time.

You can pause the stream whenever you like, hide retweets, or switch between hashtags if you are following more than one topic.

If You’re going to Host a chat – Hootsuite

hootsuiteAlthough Hootsuite is a very robust social media management tool, it’s also widely used to keep up with Twitter chats. It streams Tweets from chats to allow hosts to effectively moderate the conversation. Simply add a stream, search for the hashtag you want to track and join the conversation. You can add multiple streams, meaning you can track various Twitter chats along with your Tweets, scheduled posts, mentions, direct messages, and much more.

In addition, Hootsuite offers some great internal collaboration features, allowing you to assign Tweets to different team members and start internal chats regarding any particular tweet. Up to 3 social profiles, you can benefit from Hootsuite’s free version.

 If You’re Watching Multiple Chats on Twitter – Tweetdeck

tweet deckTweetDeck is one of the most popular free Twitter management tools because of its ability to add extra columns to target and customize streams of Tweets, making it easy to filter and keep up with lots of Twitter conversations.

A good setup in TweetDeck could be one column for @mentions of your Twitter account, two columns for the hashtag (one to watch the stream, and one toe pause/scroll through specific tweets), one user column to see the Tweets you’ve put out and one column to follow the Tweets of the chat moderator to help you keep up with the questions.

Other benefits of TweetDeck include managing multiple Twitter accounts and the ability to synchronize your configuration when you use TweetDeck on different computers and mobile devices.

tips tweet chats

Finally

Getting involved in Twitter chats is a great way to attract new followers and actively participate in relevant conversations with peers from your niche or industry. You can use any of the above tools to start leveraging the benefits of Twitter chats for your clients or yourself. Just get involved in a few chats and you’ll pick up on what to do.

 

Digital Strategies to put in your 2019 Marketing Plan

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While there are many digital strategies for marketers, the ones that stand out, are rare the ones remembered. Your clients want to use the tried and true, but they always ask for the “innovative” tactic every year. However, innovative needs to provide ROI. Here are a few strategies (that don’t have the word blockchain in the title) that will be influencing your audiences, and stealing eyeballs. These strategies have been effective for several years, and will be for several more. I recommend you provide your clients with some of the solutions below:

  • Voice activated strategies

  • Influencer marketing

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • Live Video marketing

voice

Voice Search

When you talk about change in digital marketing, search has got to be the most chaotic aspect of it all. The “Google algorithm updates” alone have kept marketers awake at night. Now with the entrance of Alexa and Google Home, search has taken on a whole new perspective. Voice search is rapidly gaining acceptance among consumers. Although still in its infancy, voice search is making a huge impact in how we get information, how we purchase products, and how we interact with our environment (home control). See how Merck is Alexa to interact with their patients.

60% of people have started using voice search within the last year.

Planning Ahead

According to ComScore, at least half of all searches will be made via voice query by 2020. That’s not so far away. And it doesn’t mean that we should ignore traditional SEO, either.

The rise in instant answers without search results will continue

You’re going to see a continual rise in instant answers. What is happening is that when a lot of these voice and conversational search queries are coming through, they tend to be longer, and they tend to be seeking out an answer that a device can quickly give you a direct answer to. Things like, what I placed here, and this requires some logic and some understanding from the machines, some contextual understanding, but it’s not that challenging, and the machines are doing a good job of this.

influencer

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing as a strategy has been growing in popularity for the past few years, but new and different types of brands are now starting to take notice. By using social media listening tools a marketer can identify individuals that will help a brand get the word out. There is a defined process to identifying these influencers, and understanding the online conversation around your brand is vital to choosing the right online influencer.

85% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations – BrightLocal Survey

influencer

84% of marketers planned on executing at least one influencer marketing campaign during 2017 – Inc.com

ai

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

AI is not new – in fact, you probably already interact with marketing AI when you see ads in search results and on social media. And, 57% of marketers already use AI. However, the use of AI for marketing is only going to grow as the technology improves. 

ai

Examples of AI in Marketing

  • Chatbots
    Chatbots designed to serve one or more purposes to the customers. For example, a chatbot operating in a chat screen of a website, or a bot operating in any social networking website’s chatbox. National Geographic lets you chat with Albert Einstein on Facebook messenger to raise awareness of the launch of its new original series Genius that dissects the psyche of the physicist Albert Einstein.
  • Data analysis
    One of the most useful examples of AI in marketing is data analysis. These days you don’t have to guess what will work for what audience. There are thousands of data points attached to the target audience that can be accurately analysed by bots to understand which message is going to appeal to whom.

AI closes the gap by moving far past human limitations to consume and analyze data on a scale no human can. The “intelligence” in artificial intelligence is the ability to think independently, to grow more knowledgeable from being exposed to more information and to adapt and adjust when things change.

  • Recommendations/content curation
    Predictive analytics allows Netflix to surface and finesse recommendations. This kind of clustering algorithm is continually improving suggestions, allowing users to make the most of their subscription.Uniting information from diverse datasets is a common use of AI.Under Armour is one of the many companies to have worked with IBM’s Watson. The sports apparel company combines user data from its Record app with third-party data and research on fitness, nutrition etc.The result is the ability for the brand to offer up relevant (personalized) training and lifecycle advice based on aggregated wisdom.
  • Content Generation
    A significant portion of sports and finance related articles are already written by machines, not humans. With AI marketing, this trend is poised to spread throughout various other industries. Finance and sports are traditionally numbers-heavy industries, which makes it easy for AI programs to understand the data and translate it into human-readable articles.
    A creative solution would be providing thoughtful answers in real time to customers. Check out Google Duplex coming soon.

google ai

In 2017, marketing platforms collected and stored information such as site usage, browsing patterns, search history and content preferences to create customer profiles and behavior marketing strategies that help marketers create custom messages to address these prospects. But the next step is even more exciting.

Consider These Stats and Facts

live video

Live Video, because it’s Live – Instant Gratification

Like AI, live video is nothing new, but it’s growing exponentially. Everyone wants a piece of Facebook Live.

And, it isn’t just popular with marketers. People love watching live video too. In fact, 80% of users said they’d rather watch a live video than read a blog post, while according to Facebook, live video gets 3x more views.

Here are a few tips for getting started with live video:

  1. Use live video at events to give followers a behind-the-scenes look at the event.
  2. Show off holiday displays and sales in live video.
  3. Use live video to introduce your followers to your employees.
  4. Advertise an exclusive sale or promotion to anyone who watches your live video.

Consider These Stats and Facts

  • The $127 billion autonomous vehicle market is being driven by AI. That’s how much the self-driving car market is expected to be worth worldwide by 2027
  • 76% of smart home speaker users conduct local searches at least once a week—with 53% performing daily searches
  • Live video is more appealing to brand audiences: 80% would rather watch live video from a brand than read a blog, and 82% prefer live video from a brand to social posts.

How AI is changing Business: A look at the limitless potential of AI 

Influencer marketing is here to stay

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Influencer marketing has been growing in popularity for the past few years and is becoming a strong player in the marketing tool kit. By using social media listening tools a marketer can identify individuals that will help a brand get the word out. Understanding the online conversation around your brand is vital to choosing the right online influencer. You can start with simple less costly tools seen here, before moving to more expensive, but comprehensive tools like Symplur, Traackr or Brandwatch. They will segment and narrow down your search for the perfect Influencers.

influencer marketing

There is a defined process to identifying influencers, and you’ll need more than one tool to get the job done, but the payoff can be very beneficial. Here’s a few benefits and key objectives to discuss with your clients.

  1. Expanding your brand’s reach
    Growing an audience is a long-term task, but you want it to have as many growth spurts as possible. Partnering with an influencer expands your reach more quickly than some organic methods.
  2. Generating user-generated content
    Partnering with influencers to create content together takes some of the content creation off your own team’s plate.
  3. Drive traffic
    Whether an influencer is promoting you in a website review or in a tweet, including a link back to your website will drive their audience to check out your brand.
  4. Improve SEO
    In addition to driving traffic, quality backlinks can help improve your website’s search rankings and traffic. By generating backlinks from influencers who have high authority websites, you can improve your SEO game.
  5. Boost your reputation
    A trustworthy source goes a long way in shaping someone’s opinion. Influencers are highly trusted by their audience, so an endorsement or partnerships can go a long way in building your brand’s reputation.
  6. Finally – Helps to Drive sales
    According to AdWeek, surveys have found that 74% of consumers identify word-of-mouth as a key influencer in their purchasing decisions.


Closer look at the Influencer

Using social media influencers in your marketing is the practice of building relationships with the people who can build relationships for you. Whether an influencer’s audience is small or large does not mater as much that they can reach your audience via their blogs and social networks that your brand may not be able to. Your targeted audience needs to trust your influencer. YouTubers like Casey Neistat reviews his products in a unique way. Even if he likes it he faults it, but when he talks about a product, it increases sales. It’s definitely not the 1970’s style of advertising. Take a look at his style here.

85% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations

influencer

Clothing and beauty brands have had great success with using micro influencers and major celebrities for a while now, but now brands like Amazon, and even healthcare are getting in on the action. People are more apt to make a purchase after reading reviews or listening to an influencer. As you research influencers you’ll uncover a competitive landscape for your client too.

According to a study by Adweek, 75% of brands engage with influencers as a part of their main marketing strategy.

Components of an influencer marketing strategy

  • Identify the topics of influence that speak to your brand’s target buyers.
  • Vet the influencers who are a good contextual fit with your brand. Look for content quality, reach, engagement and an alignment of values with your brand.
  • Relate and engage with your target influencers via email and other social channels. Ask them to partner with your brand and offer them compensation to create mutually beneficial relationships.
  • Measure all earned media and identify which influencers and which topics lift your brand the most.
  • Repeat. Once you’ve identified who and what works best for your brand you can build a stronger influencer marketing strategy each time around. You should have around 10-15 to pick from, and you’ll get 2-3 solid influencers.

influencer-marketing
Map the influencer landscape

Before reaching out to influencers or building a list, you need to understand the influencers in your industry. Map out the different segments. Are they leaders in their fields? Do they report the news on a regular basis? Do they create content or are the passive viewers?

influencer mapping

When mapping the landscape, track these areas:

  • Where do conversations and shares about your topic take place? How social is the market?
  • What motivates people in your market to promote content about your topic?
  • Is activity concentrated among a few publishers, or is the market more fragmented?
  • What’s the author model for key publications? Do they have in-house journalists, regular contributors, guest bloggers – or a mix of all 3?
  • What’s the background of the popular authors in your space?

At the end of the day, the time you spend creating the right strategy and identifying the right influencer, the more impactful influencer marketing will be. Remember that honest dialogue generates true relationships.

How Digital Marketing Really Works

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Clicks, Clicks, Clicks…

In case you have wondered about the magic behind making your business go from zero to 100 overnight, then this video shows you how digital marketing data is computed. Who is your audience? Where do they reside geographically?

The mastermind behind this internet strategy was not born yesterday. Or were they? 

Watch the video…

 

Engage, Optimize and Convert: 3 Digital Marketing Tools for Marketers

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You have a blog or a website your promoting and you want to make some real increases in traffic and engagement. If you only have 30 minutes a day to spend on digital marketing what should you do? These 3 areas I believe will be the best bang for your buck. It’s easy for marketers to just say “engage your customer”, “optimize” and build a “conversion strategy”. But it always seems to get lost in the mix of digital strategies. Six months after the digital strategy was developed, are marketers still following the plan? Or are they just trying to get something live. We’ve all been there. So go back to the basics. Look at the content you have developed or already have in your arsenal and then – Fine Tune!

Content-is-king

1. Are your pages optimized for conversions 

  • What do you want visitors to do when they land on your site? Your entire content strategy should be built with this question in mind. Once you know the action you want users to do then you can find the tools for initiating those actions. You have a Landing Page – right?
  • Capture a first name and an email. Thats all you need to extend the conversation. Then leverage affordable services like MailChimp or Constant Contact for drip campaigns.
  • Use free tools like Google Analytics to monitor visitor’s paths to the website and once they are on it, find opportunities to create a more user-friendly experience.
  • Optimize forms on your site to build a stronger inbound lead funnel. If the user has an easy form to fill out they will complete it. Measure what your content is worth agains the amount of info you are asking them to divulge.

Flat design modern vector illustration concept of SEO word combined from elements and icons which symbolized a success internet searching optimization process. Isolated on stylish colored background

2. Optimize Your SEO

SEO optimization might be the single best area you can focus on. The more you optimize, the more of your audience you reach. And not the masses, but the people who are your customers. We’re spear fishing here, not throwing out a net. Know your audience, where they live and go fishing.

The SEO specialist on your team should ensure your content is optimized with focus keywords, Google-friendly HTML formatting, and a URL structure that correlates with your product keywords. Use hyphens, not underscore. No caps in the url. Optimize images with alt tags. These are all things your SEO speialist (or you) should be focusing on when publishing.

A-B_TestingThe best way to track and measure SEO is predominately held in Google Analytics. But there are some easy tests you should be performing such as:

  • A/B testing for your home page and messaging
    • Test different subject lines and calls to action to see what approach attracts the most clicks
    • Test different creative to see what provides better engagement
  • Google analytics:
    • Traffic – track the volume of traffic and break it down into categories like organic, paid, and referral
    • Demographics – are you attracting the right audience – look at gender, age and location
  • Devices – what is your audience viewing your site on. Is it mobile? is your site optimized for mobile?


social icons3. Engage with your followers

Social media is a way for your startup to interact with current and future customers. Leverage your followers and make them feel like valuable members of your brand. Find out which social platforms your customers are on and build out a content schedule – be frequent and consistent with your message. As you can imagine the big 6 are FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube and Pinterest. But it totally depends on your audience. 

Lastly, nothing you try is a failure. Every attempt is a learning so do not hide from failures. Strategically approach these as opportunities to win over customers with good customer service and express your brand’s long-term vision as frequently as possible.

“Email is still the number one method of engagement”

  1. The total number of worldwide email accounts is expected to increase to over 4.3 billion accounts by year-end 2016. (Radicati Group)
  2. It’s projected that in 2014, 191.4 billion emails will be sent and received each day with about 108 billion of those being from the business sector. (Radicati Group)
  3. 78% of marketing emails are sent to a personal email account. (ChoozOn)

marketing-online-budget-money If you have a little money this may be for you.

  • Facebook is the world: Facebook is steadily becoming a pay-to-play platform, and if you want to see any engagement you will need to invest into promoting your Facebook posts.
  • Sponsored tweets: While Twitter still provides a good amount of organic engagement, the microblogging platform also has paid solutions for businesses, with one being sponsored tweet. By providing a sponsored tweet, higher engagement will most likely occur with followers (and others).
  • LinkedIn’s premium services: LinkedIn is a inexpensive way to increase your connections and promote your services in a professional manor. They collect a lot of data and can target audiences extremely well.

DM in 5 minutes with Alexis Ohanian

Enhance Your Digital Marketing Strategy With A Blog

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I’m sure you’ve heard about blogging but before you just dismiss it as something nerds do, think again. This is your “Owned Media” and you control the message.

blog nerdAs of February 2014, there were approximately:

  • 172 million Tumblr
  • 75.8 million WordPress blogs in existence worldwide.
  • 180 million – Blogger, a Google product, is the most popular blogging service used today, however Blogger does not offer public statistics.
  • Technorati has 1.3 million blogs
  • Livejournal reports to have 62.6 million blogs
  • Weebly states it has over 12 million blogs
  • Blogster has over 582,754 blogs

There are 8 new posts to WordPress every second!

You get the picture. However, what you may not know is that a blog can also be a very powerful marketing tool for your business, and provide value and validity to your brand.

blog siloWhat it will do for marketing? – A good blog can:

  • Drive traffic to your website,
  • Generate more engagement on your site
  • Create an additional cash stream
  • Add validity to your website/brand
  • Influence users to purchase
  • Raise you organic search

Blogs are conversational in nature, opinionated and sometimes controversial. You can throttle the level engagement with your writing style. More importantly it can continue the conversation and support your marketing efforts in a way that other formats can’t.

The Basics

A “blog” (derived from the term “web log”) is basically just a website with two key differences: First, it’s extremely easy to add information to it. A blog is like an online journal, so you just log in, type your story, post it, and you’re officially a blogger! Second, you can add a simple little feature that automatically tells a whole bunch of other websites that you’ve made an update to your blog – every time you make a change.

Excited yet? You should be–blogging’s not just a winning strategy, it’s also a lot of fun! The beauty of blogging is that you can easily incorporate it into your daily schedule of tasks. You can even blog when you’re on the road.

 

Ready to get started? What does it take to become a really successful blogger?

  1. Great content: If your content isn’t interesting and relevant to your target market, your blog won’t work. It’s as simple as that. 
  2. Updating on a regular basis: There are some days when I really find it hard to make time to post a new article, but people look to your blog as a subscription. Regularly adding fresh content to your blog also gives you a boost in the search engine rankings.
  3. Your voice: It’s important that you write in your own voice. A blog is no place for formality and corporate speak. 

 Check out David Risleys’ Coffee Break Blogging if you want to start one or market one.

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